Louise Johns

Dr Louise Johns is a post-doctoral research scientist, specialising in agroecology and crop pathology. She is responsible for the field surveying campaign for the "One Crop Health" project in the UK.

The OCH project aims to identify features of ‘healthy’ agroecosystems and opportunities for reduced pesticide use. It is using surveys of commercial farms, large scale experiments and computational models to understand interactions between crop pests, weeds, diseases and functional biodiversity, and how these are influenced by management practices and environmental factors.

Louise’s background is in molecular pathology of fungal crop diseases – having worked for two years on fungal genetics in the crop protection industry, and prior to that completing her PhD in plant pathology. For her PhD, Louise studied how Fusarium graminearum (an important fungal pathogen of wheat) maintains its nutrient homeostasis during infection, and the significance of this to disease and mycotoxin contamination. A highlight was the publication in 'Nature Food' of her and colleagues’ work revealing the scale of mycotoxin contamination in European wheat, which was picked up by The Conversation, The Sun and Sky News.